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A Wizard Cultivator: Zelda Fitzgerald's Save Me the Waltz

As Asylum Autobiography Mary E. Wood

University of Oregon

While most early twentieth-century American autobiographies that tell stories of mental illness endorse the methods and solutions of modern psychiatry Zelda Fitzgerald's Save Me the Waltz challenges and rewrites the expected descriptions, diagnoses, and definitions of the mentally ill woman. As this autobiographical novel, which Fitzgerald published in 1932, takes us from the childhood and marriage of main character Alabama Beggs through her ballet career, physical illness, and recovery, it both obscures and reveals a fragmented story of mental turmoil and incarceration. In Save Me the Waltz a narrative about Alabama's bodily experience is substituted for a suppressed story of mental illness. Through this substitution, the novel not only avoids conventional representations of the insane woman-such as the version of Zelda produced in F. Scott Fitzgerald's 1934 novel Tender Is the Night-but exposes those representations and the psychiatric discourse surrounding them as dependent upon an appropriation and objectification of female bodies.

From the beginnings of the modern mental institution in the nineteenth- century asylum, autobiographical writings have appeared that describe the experiences of those interned in such institutions. Many of these nineteenth-century pieces were published as part of a larger movement to reform the asylum and educate the public about the needs of"the insane."1 The early twentieth century saw a shift in both the reception and presenta- tion of autobiographies by inmates in mental institutions. Where the nineteenth-century autobiography tended to protest asylum conditions and advocate reforms, after the turn of the century these narratives began to appear with introductions and addenda by psychologists and psychiatrists who presented the texts as evidence of both their professional ability to cure the patient and the wonders and terrors of mental illness as experienced from the inside. Most widely acclaimed of these was Clifford Beers's 1908 autobiography, A Mind That Found Itself. In a letter that Beers included in the final pages of his book, William James remarks: "As for contents, [this

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Ballerinas. Painting by Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald. Reprinted by kind permission of the Collection of the Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts, Montgomery, Alabama. Gift of the Artist.

book] is fit to remain in literature as a classic account 'from within' of an insane person's psychology."2

Similarly, in his introduction to Jane Hillyer's well-received 1926 auto- biography, Reluctantly Told, neurologist Joseph Collins stresses that her book is "a contribution to the understanding and plumbing of mental disorders" and "a contribution to literature."3 He sees it as useful not only for "the personnel of institutions for the insane," who "will find in it information and encouragement, possibly even a tiny bit of reproach," but for laypersons who "have a vast amount of misinformation" about insanity.4 In other words, Collins presents Hillyer's narrative as a literary piece that supports the decisions and practices of psychiatrists, a kind of tool for mediating between laypersons and professionals in the discussion of insanity.

In his introduction to Marian King's 1931 narrative, The Recovery of My- self, prominent psychologist Adolf Meyer, like Collins, uses the autobiogra- phy to promote expert opinion on the use of confinement for the mentally ill. He claims that King's autobiography is valuable because it shows the public the good in psychiatry and the success of expert ideas, acted out in the course of the narrative. Over the period of her treatment, King "became socialized, a participant in the hospital world, and finally capable of seeing herself as the physician sees her, with a growing sense of proportion and perspective."5 Her "cure" is enacted in the narrative itself, which ends with King's declaration, "So from vital experience I can testify to the modern miracles being wrought by the new revelations of psychology and its prac- tical applications in psychiatry."6

In the tradition of twentieth-century asylum autobiographers, who were often encouraged to begin their life stories while still in the asylum, Zelda Fitzgerald finished her autobiographical novel in 1932 while a patient at Adolf Meyer's Phipps Psychiatric Clinic of The Johns Hopkins University Hospital in Baltimore. She had begun to break down emotionally in 1929 and had spent time in institutions in Europe before returning to the United States for treatment at the Phipps Clinic. Her choice not to tell explicitly the story of her illness and hospitalization is a strategic one; she writes this novel against the expectations for asylum autobiography, expectations that would shape and constrict her narrative.

Fitzgerald feared that, as a woman labeled mentally ill, she played a part in a script written for her by husband and doctor, a script that-fulfilling her fears-has played itself out in novel, case history, biography, and review.7 As Mary Gordon points out, "real labor is required to read her without prejudice of one sort or another, to read her not as a symbol of something but as the creator of works of art."8 As she waited in the Phipps Clinic for the publication of Save Me the Waltz, Fitzgerald did write a brief asylum auto- biography at the suggestion of her psychiatrists. Showing an acute suspicion

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of the uses of such a narrative, not only did she refer to this autobiography as a "fairy tale," but she left five blank lines for her psychiatrists to fill in.9 Even as she described her experience of breakdown in the narrative, she thus undercut its authenticity by presenting it to her doctors as a document they could cowrite, a document shaped by prevailing definitions of femininity, mental illness, and cure.

Zelda Fitzgerald's life and writing are particularly important to reevaluate because her illness served as a focal point for significant early twentieth- century narratives about women and mental illness. Not only was she treated by some of the most noted psychologists of the age-Oscar Forel, Paul Bleuler, and Adolf Meyer - all of whom created stories about her "case," but her life and illness were described/created within what was to become a canonized American literary classic, F. Scott Fitzgerald's Tender Is the Night. Published two years earlier, Zelda Fitzgerald's own largely unrecognized autobiographical novel challenges the version of her life that later would be set forth by her husband in the character of Nicole Diver. The canonical success of Tender Is the Night has helped obscure Zelda Fitzgerald's telling of her own story and contributed to her popular image as a strange, mentally disturbed character.

When F. Scott Fitzgerald makes Nicole Diver's husband a psychiatrist in Tender Is the Night, he evokes connections forged in the nineteenth century between ideologies of marriage and medicine. As the field of medicine-and especially what was to become psychiatry-became increasingly profes- sionalized, middle-class American women became more subject to the advice of"experts," who saw the female body as both delicate and dangerous. Just as women were expected to submit to their husbands' authority in marriage, they were encouraged to yield to the diagnoses and prescriptions of physicians and psychologists who tried to save their sanity by controlling their bodies. As Foucault points out, nineteenth-century medicine was characterized by "a hysterization of women's bodies: a threefold process whereby the feminine body was analyzed-qualified and disqualified-as being thoroughly saturated with sexuality."10 This sexualized body was described and controlled in a discourse that intimately linked physical symptoms and insanity. Thus in a description of"puerperal insanity," physi- cian and asylum superintendent Andrew McFarland writes that the sufferer "becomes irritable, subject to causeless fits of passion, and jealous of, and estranged from those in whom she had before invested fullest confidence. Sometimes she is merely changed in temperament, and is moody, solitary, and reserved. These symptoms have their aggravation whenever the func- tions of the uterine system are in action, till a regular monthly fit of spleen, or something worse, becomes habitual."11 McFarland describes the woman's behavior not in terms of her relations with those around her or with a larger

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social system, but in terms of the function of her reproductive organs, a function seen less as abnormal than as normally pathological.

While with the advent of psychoanalysis the patient participated more in her own recovery through the "talking cure," medical ideology still required that she remain under the authority of the psychiatrist. In fact, from the point of view of the psychoanalyst, women's language often became one more site of symptomology and thus less a manifestation of subjectivity than an object, like the female body, to be analyzed and discussed. In an early study of Anna 0., Josef Breuer writes:

Some ten days after her father's death a consultant was brought in, whom, like all strangers, she completely ignored while I demonstrated all her peculiarities to him. "That's like an examination," she said, laughing, when I got her to read a French text aloud in English. The other physician intervened in the conversation and tried to attract her attention, but in vain. It was a genuine "negative hallucination" of the kind which has since so often been produced experimentally. In the end he succeeded in breaking through it by blowing smoke in her face. She suddenly saw a stranger before her, rushed to the door to take away the key and fell unconscious to the ground.12

Anna O.'s verbal reaction to the demonstration, her laughter, her refusal to acknowledge the observer, and her frightened reaction to the observer's physical intrusion upon her all carry equal weight as symptoms in Breuer's description. He presents the scene not as an interaction among three people but as his own supposedly objective record of one person's words and behavior.

F. Scott Fitzgerald's novel takes on these issues of women's sanity by telling a story of complex power relations between Doctor Dick Diver and his young wife Nicole, who struggles with schizophrenia. In one sense the novel deconstructs the conventional relationship between medical authority and patient. As the story becomes less about Nicole's mental illness and more about Doctor Diver's progressive alcoholism, the opening section title, "Case History, 1917-1919," sounds more and more ironic: the "case" of doctor-husband eclipses that of the disturbed young woman. Yet in another sense the application of the title to Nicole's case is never completely erased. Our view of Nicole as a patient is firmly established in the opening scenes, in which Nicole's psychiatrist discusses her relationship with Dick Diver, who is becoming both lover and doctor through "a transference of the most fortuitous kind."'3 These scenes are chilling if only by virtue of the fact that Nicole's own voice is absent and her person objectified by the two men, even though we infer that the "transference" has been diagnosed based on her own words. The dialogue between psychiatrist and patient that constitutes

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part of her treatment here gives way to a dialogue about her and, more specifically, about her physical attractiveness. When Diver remarks, "The girl was about the prettiest thing I ever saw," psychiatrist Franz Gregorovius replies, "She still is" (p. 8). He goes on to say, "I'm intensely proud of this case, which I handled, with your accidental assistance" (p. 9). The line between doctor and lover blurs for both men, and they see as their purpose the cure of the female "case," who ideally will remain entirely dependent upon and grateful to them. Her own words become subsumed within the body they see her as, the body that is understood to be the object of treatment despite any discussion of her mental condition.

It is the physical powerlessness of this "scarcely saved waif of disaster" (p. 27) that attracts Dick Diver, who becomes more interested in her when he hears from Franz that she became ill after being raped by her father at a young age. Fitzgerald presents the story of Nicole's rape as a crucial narrative within the larger tale, a narrative that brings the two men together and motivates their continued interest in her:

"Now about the girl, Dick," [Franz] said. "Of course, I want to find out about you and tell you about myself, but first about the girl, because I have been waiting to tell you about it so long."

He searched for and found a sheaf of papers in a filing cabinet, but after shuffling through them he found they were in his way and put them on his desk. Instead he told Dick the story. (p. 14)

More important than the personal stories of the two friends is this narrative of a girl's rape by her father, a narrative that has stirred Franz so much that he must drop his professional papers and shape the story with his own words. The molding of the incident gives him a power over the rape itself, a power that places him in the position of both sympathetic doctor and rapist. With this story, he offers Nicole up to Dick, hoping for a successful "transference," for a replaying of the father-daughter relationship so that it will come out right. It is this perception of another man's power over her and violation of her that brings Dick to want to marry Nicole. Fitzgerald writes,

The luncheon in Zurich was a council of caution; obviously the logic of his life tended away from the girl; yet when a stranger stared at her from a nearby table, male eyes burning disturbingly like an uncharted light, he turned to the man with an urbane version of the intimidation and broke the regard. (p. 28)

The "yet" here implies that despite his reluctance to become attached to her, his own jealousy and rivalry with another man spurs his interest.

While at times the novel upsets husband-wife-psychiatrist power relations

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by revealing them, it more frequently recreates them. Nicole in her illness remains elusive, undecipherable throughout the narrative. Her illness itself seems mysterious, dangerous-as when she unexpectedly tries to force the family car off the road-and often linked to hatred of men. Franz remarks in describing her progression from rape to madness that "she developed the idea that she had had no complicity-and from there it was easy to slide into a phantom world where all men, the more you liked them and trusted them, the more evil-" (p. 20). In this image of Nicole Diver we see beneath the language of psychoanalysis and modern diagnosis the persistent nineteenth- century picture of madwoman as both completely powerless and potentially all-powerful, the "waif" and the "complicit" seductress. These images ap- peared throughout nineteenth-century art and literature as representations not only of women who lost their reason but of women living in particular kinds of bodies. Elaine Showalter has traced the history of both the Crazy Jane figure, who "was a touching image of feminine vulnerability and a flattering reminder of female dependence upon male affection," and the Lucy figure, who "represented female sexuality as insane violence against men."14 The embodiment of both these figures in Nicole Diver shows that representations of the madwoman were still alive and well in Fitzgerald's twentieth-century America.

Zelda Fitzgerald was aware of the dangers of conventional narratives. In her biography of Zelda, Nancy Milford shows that while Zelda often cooper- ated with her husband and the psychologists who treated her, she feared that if she lived the cure written out for her she would lose her creativity. She wrote to well-known alienist Forel:

if you do cure me whats going to happen to all the bitterness and unhappiness in my heart-It seems to me a sort of castration, but since I am powerless I suppose I will have to submit, though I am neither young enough nor credulous enough to think that you can manufacture out of nothing something to replace the song I had.15

She fears that her creativity will be replaced with something else. Her sense that cure is castration, a loss of power, is recreated in Scott Fitzgerald's picture of Nicole Diver manipulated and created by doctor, husband, and, ultimately, male author.

Ironically enough, Zelda Fitzgerald rebelled against the possibility that her life might be material for someone else's story. She wrote to her husband: "Mamma does know whats the matter with me. She wrote me she did. You can put that in your story to lend it pathos."'6 As Milford points out, Zelda was distraught that Scott lifted sections of her intimate personal letters to him for inclusion in Tender Is the Night, which he worked on sporadically

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during her illness and hospitalization. The issue of whose writing and whose experience belonged to whom emerged repeatedly in their relationship. Again, this is not just a question of one interesting marriage between colorful figures; Zelda Fitzgerald's disempowerment during the course of her illness and in her characterization as Nicole bears on much wider issues of women's relationship to psychiatric authority, the institution of marriage, and the right to authorship. Milford shows that when Scott Fitzgerald was outraged that Save Me the Waltz had gone to the publisher without his permission and that it contained possible references to his personal life unapproved by him, he received an apology from the psychiatrists who had "allowed" Zelda Fitzgerald to send it out.17 As Judith Fetterley has pointed out, "as husband, professional writer and 'sane,' Scott had the right to play the role of editor and authorizer in relation to Zelda's work."'8 The kind of collusion between author-husband and psychiatrists that Tender Is the Night portrays was lived by Zelda Fitzgerald. The agreement between Forel and Scott Fitzgerald to discourage her from dancing is one example of this collusion.19 The infantilization of a mentally ill woman that an astute reader can see in the portrayal of Nicole Diver reverberates in Zelda Fitzgerald's appeal to Scott to help her "not as you would a child but as an equal."20

Given that Zelda Fitzgerald suspected both the requirements of asylum autobiography and her husband's representations of her life, I think we need to read Save Me the Waltz as the partly veiled autobiography she wanted to write. At the same time it is not insignificant that Fitzgerald's auto- biographical novel refuses to tell an explicit tale of mental illness. As she neglects the story of her mental breakdown, she parallels and subverts the expected narrative of psychological journey and cure by telling the tale of her career and failure as a ballet dancer. This tale brings into the foreground the cultural construction of women as the material of male art, whether in dance or psychiatry. Far from being a story whose main value lies in its appeal to those interested in ballet, as F. Scott Fitzgerald saw it, the novel is an indictment of the self-revulsion and abuse of the body integral to the art of ballet as Zelda Fitzgerald describes it.21 This reading of the novel has gone largely unacknowledged in what little criticism exists on Zelda Fitzgerald's work. Feminist critics of the 1980s tended to see Alabama's dancing career primarily as fulfilling expression within an otherwise frustrated life. For example, Sarah Beebe Fryer claims, "Despite her associates' refusal to take her career seriously, Alabama becomes a good dancer-and derives signifi- cant personal satisfaction from her ability."22 For Linda Wagner, the pain Alabama suffers is an unfortunate hindrance to her ballet career rather than an expression of self-abuse. She sees Alabama as "defeated (in the fiction) by the very body that was to be her means into the world of art."23

As readers aware of Zelda Fitzgerald's diagnosis of mental illness, we

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cannot help but see in her story of ballet-a story in which mental illness is never mentioned-the diagnosis and control of the female body enacted in an art form. Save Me the Waltz reveals the diagnostic sentencing of women not only within the realm of mental illness-the obscured yet always present subject of the novel-but within the wider cultural context of definitions of femininity and of artistic creation and convention. Within these defini- tions, the female body is the living metaphor for the material of art, the object of the male artist. As Gordon points out, Alabama's flesh is marked as female and thus must be brought under control.24 Yet the female ballet dancer is both artist and material; her body is shaped both by the male director and by herself. She is thus split from her own body-precisely one of the conditions manifested in both hysteria and schizophrenia. In her history of female insanity, Elaine Showalter claims that "the 'withness' of the flesh, and its proper management, adornment, and disposition, are a crucial and repeated motif in the schizophrenic women's sense of themselves as unoc- cupied bodies." Showalter further points out that the split between body and mind is reinforced by the treatments of these diseases, treatments that objectify the women diagnosed as mentally ill.25

Alabama Beggs grows up within a world severely circumscribed first by the authority of her father, Judge Austin Beggs, and later by her husband, painter David Knight. Her father's position as judge makes him a powerful figure in both the home and the community. To Alabama, her "father was a wise man. Alone his preference in women had created Millie and the girls."26 Ala- bama, her sisters, and her mother Millie live within the highly ordered system of Judge Beggs's mind.

Later, Alabama finds in David both an escape from this home and the power of another male authority. From the beginning, David finds himself complete in a way she cannot:

He verified himself in the mirror-pale hair like eighteenth-century moon- light and eyes like grottoes, the blue grotto, the green grotto, stalactites and malachites hanging about the dark pupil-as if he had taken an inventory of himself before leaving and was pleased to find himself complete. (p. 38)

It is this ability to verify oneself in the mirror that Alabama increasingly finds beyond her reach. For her, looking into the mirror means losing a sense of herself as a separate being. Love for her is not an experience of com- pleteness but one of dissolution. As she comes to love David,

so close and closer she felt herself that he became distorted in her vision, like pressing her nose upon a mirror and gazing into her own eyes. She felt the lines of his neck and his chipped profile like segments of the wind blowing about her

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consciousness. She felt the essence of herself pulled finer and smaller like those streams of spun glass that pull and stretch till there remains but a glimmering illusion. (p. 38)

Her inability to retain a sense of herself intensifies as she begins to train under Madame Sirgeva, the fictional counterpart of Fitzgerald's teacher Egorova. Alabama Knight works unceasingly in the dance studio, despite the Paris heat and the rebellion of her tired body.

The heat of July beat on the studio skylight and Madame sprayed the air with disinfectant. The starch in Alabama's organdy skirts stuck to her hands and sweat rolled into her eyes till she couldn't see. Choking dust rose off the floor, the intense glare threw a black gauze before her eyes. It was humiliating that Madame should have to touch her pupil's ankles when they were so hot. The human body was very insistent. Alabama passionately hated her inability to discipline her own. Learning how to manage it was like playing a desperate game with herself. She said to herself, "My body and I," and took herself for an awful beating: that was how it was done. (pp. 124-25)

Alabama's separation from her body here represents a rejection, a disgust at the body she cannot control. Even as she presents the ballet as Alabama's only outlet for self-expression, Fitzgerald clearly ties the women dancers' self- abuse in ballet training to the demands of their master Diaghilev, a kind of ruling patriarch who, like Judge Beggs, requires the obedience of the danc- ing daughters who adore him. Writes Fitzgerald, "If they weighed more than fifty kilos, Diaghilev protested in his high screeching voice, 'You must get thin. I cannot send my dancers to a gymnasium to fit them for adagio.' He never thought of the women as dancers, except the stars" (p. 144). In a differential diagnosis of the women's physical condition, he describes them as dancers, as stars, or as overweight nuisances.

Fitzgerald's narrative delineates her internalization of male requirements for the female body, requirements against which the body rebels even as she struggles to bring it under control. She looks at her own body more and more critically from the outside, as a doctor or a ballet master might see it: her "work grew more and more difficult. In the mazes of the masterful fouette her legs felt like dangling hams; in the swift elevation of the entrechat cinq she thought her breasts hung like old English dugs" (p. 154). Alabama here describes her body as split off into different chunks of meat. The narrative calls attention to Alabama's objectification of her body as the narrator remarks, "It did not show in the mirror. She was nothing but sinew" (p. 154). These sentences imply not only that she has a view of her body as detached from her sense of self, but that her actual body has somehow become invisible.

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Obsessed by a sense that her body is muscular, disjointed meat, she has lost any recognition of it as existing beyond the diagnostic sentence she herself enforces. The descriptions of her body recall earlier descriptions of Alabama's childhood home dominated by her father:

Winter and spring, the house is like some lovely shining place painted on a mirror. When the chairs fall to pieces and the carpets grow full of holes, it does not matter in the brightness of that presentation. The house is a vacuum for the culture of Austin Beggs' integrity. (pp. 6-7)

If the imagined mirror here gives back a reflection of her father's ordered world, the mirror at the dance studio shows her a picture detached from her lived bodily experience. The body she lives in cannot be envisioned; it cannot exist in the ordered world of Diaghilev or Judge Beggs. Eventually, as Alabama tries to shape her body according to father Diaghilev and mother Sirgeva's rules, she develops an infection in her foot (caused by glue in her ballet slipper) that leads to hospitalization, blood poisoning, hallucinations, and a permanent leg injury-a chain of events resulting in the end of her dancing career.

This story of physical defeat and illness, a story that enacts Alabama's objectification of her own body, parallels and evokes a silent narrative of her mental breakdown. Alabama's apparent escape from a conventional life and subsumed identity, an escape through artistic self-expression in dance, leads only to a profound experience of separation from herself. Identifying with the artist as male subject (the successful artists in the novel-husband David and master Diaghilev-are men), Alabama has tried to make her own body the material of her art. Physical and mental breakdown become indis- tinguishable in the novel as she lies with her legs restrained in sliding pulleys, listening to doctors, husband, ballet instructor conspire about her condition. Sirgeva laments, "If she had only disinfected" (p. 192), voicing Alabama's own disgust with the infected nature of her flesh. But her injury brings her separation from her body to a crisis in which she is alone in her pain, cut off from communication with those who have power over her. She asks,

Why did the doctor inhabit another world from hers? Why couldn't he hear what she was saying, and not stand talking about ice-packs?

"We will see," the doctor said, staring out of the window impassively. "I've got to have some water! Please give me some water!" The nurse went on methodically straightening the dressings on the wheel-

table. (p. 192)

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The body that would not appear in the mirror finally cries out in thirst only to be ignored by the enforcers of hospital rules. Her felt body manifests itself where the seen body cannot, but the seen body is the only one acknowledged in the medical/epistemological system in which she finds herself. Even her words fail to convey her subjectivity. Offered up as dialogue with no re- sponse, they lie like prone objects on the white page, just as her body lies helpless on the hospital bed.

Alabama's isolation in pain and illness recalls not only Fitzgerald's own mental illness but her related struggle with a painful, recurring eczema condition. Multiple and conflicting meanings given her disease emerge both in her descriptions of Alabama's trapped condition and in Scott Fitzgerald's description of one of Dick Diver's female patients, who suffers and eventually dies from eczema. In Scott Fitzgerald's rendition, Dick Diver attributes his patient's illness largely to the fact that she is too upper-class and too delicate to be the artist she would like to be:

The frontiers that artists must explore were not for her, ever. She was fine- spun, inbred-eventually she might find rest in some quiet mysticism. Explo- ration was for those with a measure of peasant blood, those with big thighs and thick ankles who could take punishment as they took bread and salt, on every inch of flesh and spirit. (p. 201)

Scott Fitzgerald's language reverberates with the still reigning nineteenth- century American discourse about middle-class women's illnesses, discourse that described middle-class women as frail, dependent, susceptible to de- bilitating diseases. In this discourse, disease itself is represented as female. One prominent nineteenth-century alienist, addressing the effects of illness on men, wrote:

A man can not even exchange his roundabout and boots for a dressing-gown and slippers without being made, in feeling, at least, somewhat effeminate by the act, and what an abatement in his manliness is there when he is reduced- a single garment only excepted-to the original suit in which he made his mundane debut.27

The etiology of Alabama's condition contrasts markedly with what Scott Fitzgerald describes. The self-revulsion and physical disease that Alabama suffers are connected not to her own weak constitution but to her embattle- ment with an art form-ballet-largely controlled by men, an art that parallels medical ideology in the ways it rigidly prescribes the shape and movement of the female body. The Fitzgeralds' conflicting narratives about an illness diagnosed as psychosomatic reveal to what extent that diagnosis

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represents an interpretation indistinguishable from gender- and class- related social controls.

In her illuminating discussion of Charlotte Perkins Gilman's The Yellow Wallpaper, Paula A. Treichler remarks that "diagnosis is a 'sentence' in that it is simultaneously a linguistic entity, a declaration or judgment, and a plan for action in the real world whose clinical consequences may spell dullness, drama, or doom for the diagnosed."28 Alabama's sickness becomes the point where medical diagnosis has most succeeded in controlling her body- confining it to a sickbed surrounded by doctors. Lost in the pain of her foot while she is in the hospital, Alabama hallucinates a place with "a lake. .. so clear that she could not tell the bottom from the top," a place explosive with lush animality and sensations that seem to run together without order: "Nebulous weeds swing on the current: purple stems with fat animal leaves, long tentacular stems with no leaves at all, swishing balls of iodine and the curious chemical growths of stagnant waters" (p. 194). Out of this landscape stifling in its mixture of sexual physicality and medical imagery,

the word "sick" effaced itself against the poisonous air and jittered lamely about between the tips of the island and halted on the white road that ran straight through the middle. "Sick" turned and twisted about the narrow ribbon of the highway like a roasting pig on a spit, and woke Alabama gouging at her eyeballs with the prongs of its letters. (pp. 194-95)

The linguistic signifier that emerges from this bodily landscape is the word "sick," the one-word diagnostic sentence that defines her physical being and violates her own seeing, her own subjectivity.

This sickness is also the point, however, where subversion of the diag- nostic system becomes possible. In her illness she retreats from the demands of wifehood and of the ballet into her own imaginative world, a world in which language reveals itself as profoundly connected to bodily experience. The authority of the experts' description of her is unmasked as she realizes that the authoritative description is itself the sickness that invades and inhabits her body: the word "sick" "goug[es] at her eyeballs with the prongs of its letters." At this point she suddenly remembers her ailing father and almost simultaneously imagines his death, thinking that "without her father the world would be without its last resource" (p. 195). In the crisis of her illness, to which the diagnoses of husband, physician, ballet master have in a sense driven her, she envisions her father's death, then remarks "with a sudden sobering shock, 'it will be me who is the last resource when my father is dead"' (p. 195). Alabama is released from the patriarchal word, the word of her father (judge and pillar of his community), the source of her comfort, her dependence, and her own internalized regulatory system. When her father

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dies soon after her release from the hospital, her creativity is no longer ruled in the same way by the interlocking ideologies of submissive daughterhood, wifehood, mental illness, mental health, appropriate feminine art forms.

Indeed, when she is released from the hospital, the metaphorical prison of medical, judicial, and paternal authority, Alabama returns to her place of birth and presumably begins the third-person narrative that we have before us. The novel ends not with Alabama's celebration of the cure of her illness- the standard closing of the asylum autobiography-but with her meditation on the power of form and its relation to her own self-expression. As her husband David and she socialize with friends and family after her father's funeral, Alabama notices,

The cacophony of the table volleyed together and frustrated itself like a scherzo of Prokofiev. Alabama whipped its broken staccato into the only form she knew: schstay, schstay, brise, schstay, the phrase danced along the convolu- tions of her brain. She supposed she'd spend the rest of her life composing like that: fitting one thing into another and everything into the rules.

"What are you thinking about, Alabama?" "Forms, shapes of things," she answered. The talk pelted her consciousness

like the sound of hoofs on a pavement. (p. 208)

Later, as the guests are leaving, David chastises her by saying, "if you would stop dumping ash trays before the company has got well out of the house we would be happier." She replies, "It's very expressive of myself. I just lump everything in a great heap which I have labelled 'the past,' and, having thus emptied this deep reservoir that was once myself, I am ready to continue" (p. 212). These two passages reveal Alabama's conflicting impulses regarding form: her engrained habit of finding rules in all things and her desire to "just lump everything in a great heap." In the first passage, she describes her search for order as compulsive. The latter passage, however, is the novel's penultimate paragraph. When David chastises her for breaking a social rule, she maintains that just such lumping together at the wrong moment is "very expressive of myself."

The narrative thus presents itself as autobiography in this final descrip- tion of Alabama's creativity, even while the novel as a whole skirts the details of Zelda Fitzgerald's life. Yet this is not necessarily a contradiction, given that her analogy between self-expression and the ill-timed dumping of ashtrays challenges the notion that she must follow any generic conventions.

Ultimately, the narrative line, which seems to fizzle out at the end of the novel, may be less important than the texture of the language that evolves along the way. In the language of the narrative, her body finally reenters the picture. The criticism of the book after its release-that it was too ornate,

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flowery, exaggerated-came precisely from this entrance of the body into language. One reviewer complained of "an almost ludicrous lushness of writing."29 Several reviewers criticized the language for getting in the way of the story, which thus loses the realism it needs to make it a good novel. For one critic, the book was marred by "an extremely involved prose style which fails to do anything but clog both the action of the plot and the reader's understanding of the characters.... none of its people is more than a pivot about which the author weaves words, words, words."30 For yet another critic, "no phenomenon is too simple for her to obfuscate with the complex- ities of figure of speech." He goes on to say that "the desperation which prompts Alabama to turn to ballet-dancing with a group of dingy, im- poverished people in Paris is anything but convincing on the part of a healthy young woman (which she has been shown to be) who has a husband whom she loves and a young daughter she adores."'31 This criticism in particular reveals the expectations of many of Fitzgerald's readers: not only did they want the story and characters to be "realistic" in the first place, but their idea of what constituted a "real" story and "real" characters was determined largely by assumptions about what a "healthy young woman" might want and how she might behave.

One reviewer who actually enjoyed her prose style characterized it as having "a masculinity that is unusual; it is always vibrant and always sensitive."32 These comments suggest that objections to her prose may themselves be informed by the readers' belief that a woman's written lan- guage should subordinate itself to the story. The word "unusual" above clearly refers to the body of writing by women since masculinity would hardly be unusual in writing by men. As Alicia Ostriker remarks, "Male readers, and indeed conservative critics of any stripe, tend to be made uncomfortable by women's body imagery, to feel that it is inartistic, and to take it as evidence of the writer's shallowness, narcissism, and unseemly aggressiveness."33 While Fitzgerald's narrative tells the story of Alabama's abuse and mastery of her physical self, her prose is thick with sensual imagery that explodes any orderliness imposed on the body of the text. The narrative gives us a virtual litany of flowers, smells, body parts that, as in the hallucination passage above, disrupts the categories of disgust and pleasure even as it invokes them.

Ostriker, Helene Cixous, and other feminist theorists have explored the possibility of a "women's writing" based in female bodily experience.34 I think Zelda Fitzgerald is working, if unconsciously, towards this kind of writing, which challenges the prescriptive sentences of male-generated discourse. Even as her narrative chronicles Alabama's enactment of pa- triarchal regulation of the female body, her writing brings the body into language. In order for her language to register itself in this way, it must make

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itself felt, violating the myth that the language of autobiography must be transparent, that it must allow the reader an illusion of realism. In order to make itself felt, her language must be, in effect, inappropriate to the conventions of realistic novel and autobiography-conventions that were expected of the female autobiographer even as literary modernism was disrupting the rules of nineteenth-century realism. As the male self was acknowledging its displacement and its inabilty to know the world, Zelda Fitzgerald wrote against the ever-increasing tendency of realistic psychiatric and medical narratives to create worlds in which women's bodies would remain the described, controlled objects of discourse.

In her article "Reading the Slender Body," Susan Bordo analyzes "the contemporary preoccupation with slenderness as it functions within a modern, 'normalizing' machinery of power in general, and, in particular, as it functions to reproduce gender-relations."35 Bordo shows that in contempo- rary society conditions that appear as pathology, such as anorexia and bulimia, can actually serve an important normalizing function in defining and containing female sexuality. Fitzgerald's writing resists the ordering that Bordo describes, an ordering that Alabama associates with the hospital and the doctor's diagnosis. From her hospital room, Alabama observes that "the streets ran about the tiny grass plots like geometrical calculations-some learned doctor's half-effaced explanatory diagrams on a slate" (p. 192). The controlled rational world reminds her of the diagnosis of her own condition, which remains obscured even as it is enacted upon her.

Save Me the Waltz both reveals and resists the existence of an expanse of controlled territory-from female body to female activity to female mind- as well as a continuum of controlling discourses in dance, art, medicine, psychiatry. In the place of sickness, the controlling discourse both signals its power and faces the consequences of its violence. The sick woman, Alabama Beggs, is intensely contained and intensely explosive. In her pain and defeat, she begins to recognize the constructedness of her body and of the medical and marital narratives of her experience.

The image of tiny grass plots takes us back much earlier in the narrative to a point where, as a child, Alabama "is already contemptuous of ordered planting, believing in the possibility of a wizard cultivator to bring forth sweet-smelling blossoms from the hardest of rocks, and night-blooming vines from barren wastes, to plant the breath of twilight and to shop in marigolds" (p. 7). The narrative itself is the work of this wizard cultivator whose language has planted itself in the hard rock of the diagnostic sen- tence. Save Me the Waltz subverts the illusion of realism in autobiography in two ways. On the one hand, in substituting the ballet story for the expected schizophrenia story, the novel undermines the expected narrative, bracketed by a psychiatrist's introduction, and exposes it as a diagnosis shaping and

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controlling female experience. On the other hand, by writing the body into language, it interferes with the reader's impulse to see through language into the "real" story of illness and cure, a story that would keep the female body under control. The "night-blooming vines" of the wizard cultivator overrun the "ordered planting" of the female body in a gesture that calls into question any narrative-medical, psychiatric, literary-that describes "woman" and calls that description "real."

NOTES

1 For example, see Elizabeth Packard, The Prisoner's Hidden Life, or Insane Asylums Unveiled (Chicago: Author, 1868); Clarissa Lathrop, A Secret Institution (New York: Bryant Publishing Co., 1890); Lydia A. Smith, Behind the Scenes (Chi- cago: Culver, Page, Hoyne, and Co., 1879); and Anna Agnew, From Under the Cloud (Cincinnati: Robert Clarke and Co., 1886).

2 Clifford Whittingham Beers, A Mind That Found Itself (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1981), p. 199.

3 Joseph Collins, Introduction, Reluctantly Told, by Jane Hillyer (1926; rpt. New York: MacMillan Co., 1935), p. x.

4 Collins, p. xii. 5 Adolf Meyer, Introduction, The Recovery of Myself: A Patients Experience in a

Hospital for Mental Illness, by Marian King (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1931), p. x.

6 King, p. 147. 7 Despite efforts at objectivity and fairness, for the most part, the biographies of

the Fitzgeralds (with the exception of Milford's, cited below) follow the lead of Oscar Forel (one of her therapists) and F. Scott Fitzgerald in casting Zelda as an unbalanced, jealous, frustrated wife. Writing of her "consuming spiritual passion" about dance, Andre LeVot maintains, "A stubborn ardor fed the flame that raised her and set her spinning, a burning intoxication that charred anything that came near it," in F. Scott Fitzgerald: A Biography, trans. William Byron (New York: Warner, 1983), p. 251. Sara Mayfield reports on Forel's view of Zelda Fitzgerald as if his opinion is an objective, scientific one. Forel saw Fitzgerald as "a very difficult patient" whose "prismatic moods appealed to him as an intrinsic part of her charm," cited in Mayfield, Exiles from Paradise: Zelda and Scott Fitzgerald (New York: Delacorte Press, 1971), p. 153. Both James R. Mellow and Scott Donaldson refer to Fitzgerald's attitude toward ballet as an "obsession" and described her work accordingly. To Donaldson she was "an inspired amateur," and for Mellow, her writing produced "horrible couturier versions of the natural," in Donaldson, Fool for Love: F Scott Fitzgerald (New York: Congdon and Weed, Inc., 1983), p. 79, and Mellow, Invented Lives: E Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1984), pp. 399-400. Reviewers responded similarly. Dorothea Brande remarks that "Mrs. Fitzgerald should have had what help she needed to save her book from the danger of becoming a laughing-stock," in Bookman, 75, No. 7 (1932), 735.

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8 Mary Gordon, Introduction, Zelda Fitzgerald: The Collected Writings, ed. Mat- thew Bruccoli (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1991), p. xviii.

9 Unpublished manuscript, cited in Nancy Milford, Zelda: A Biography (New York: Harper and Row, 1970), p. 252.

10 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Vol. I: An Introduction (New York: Random House, 1980), p. 104.

11 Andrew McFarland, "Minor Mental Maladies," American Journal of Insanity, 20, No. 1 (1863), 18. See also Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, Disorderly Conduct: Visions of Gender in Victorian America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), pp. 182-216; John S. Haller, Jr., and Robin M. Haller, The Physician and Sexuality in Victorian America (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1974), pp. 24-87; and Elaine Show- alter, The Female Malady: Women, Madness, and English Culture, 1830-1980 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1985), esp. pp. 145-64.

12 Josef Breuer and Sigmund Freud, Studies on Hysteria (New York: Basic Books, Inc., 1957), p. 27.

13 F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tender Is the Night (New York: Charles Scribners Sons, 1934), p. 9. Further references to this novel will be cited in the text.

14 Showalter, pp. 13-14. 15 Quoted in Milford, p. 185. 16 Quoted in Milford, p. 170. 17 Milford, p. 217. 18 Judith Fetterley, "Who Killed Dick Diver? The Sexual Politics of Tender Is the

Night," Mosaic, 17, No. 1(1984), 112. 19 Milford, p. 165. 20 Quoted in Milford, p. 165. 21 In a letter to Harold Ober (8 February 1936), F. Scott Fitzgerald described

several movie ideas based on Zelda Fitzgerald's treatment of ballet and ballet dancers. See Matthew J. Bruccoli, ed., As Ever, Scott Fitz-: Letters Between F. Scott Fitzgerald and His Literary Agent Harold Ober, 1919-1940 (New York: J. B. Lippincott Co., 1972), p. 249. He also wrote to Maxwell Perkins in May of 1932, referring to Save Me the Waltz: "It should interest the many thousands interested in dancing. It is about something and absolutely new and should sell," in Andrew Turnbull, ed. The Letters of E Scott Fitzgerald (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1963), p. 228.

22 Sarah Beebe Fryer, "Nicole Warren Diver and Alabama Beggs Knight: Women on the Threshold of Freedom," Modemrn Fiction Studies, 31, No. 2 (1985), 324.

23 Linda Wagner, "Save Me the Waltz: An Assessment in Craft," Journal of Narrative Technique, 12, No. 3 (1982), 206.

24 Writes Gordon, "Flesh belongs to the mother, and, like everything female, for Alabama, it is inferior. The aloof, father-judge is replaced by the implacable ideal of pure art; the female, growing in the middle, can only be starved into madness," p. xxii.

25 Showalter, p. 212. 26 Zelda Fitzgerald, Save Me the Waltz (Carbondale, Illinois: Southern Illinois

University Press, 1987), p. 24. Further references to this novel will be cited in the text.

27 McFarland, p. 12.

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28 Paula A. Treichler, "Escaping the Sentence: Diagnosis and Discourse in 'The Yellow Wallpaper,"' in Feminist Issues in Literary Scholarship, ed. Shari Benstock (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), p. 71.

29 Brande, p. 735. 30 Review of Save Me the Waltz, Forum and Century, 88, No. 6 (1932), xi. 31 Geoffrey Hellman, Saturday Review of Literature, 22 October 1932, p. 190. 32 Review of Save Me the Waltz, New York Herald Tribune Books, 30 October 1932,

p. lOx. 33 Alicia Ostriker, Stealing the Language: The Emergence of Women's Poetry in

America (Boston: Beacon Press, 1986), p. 92. 34 Helene Cixous writes to women, "write your self. Your body must be heard.

Only then will the immense resources of the unconscious spring forth. Our naphtha will spread, throughout the world, without dollars-black or gold-nonassessed values that will change the rules of the old game," in "The Laugh of the Medusa," in New French Feminisms, ed. Elaine Marks and Isabelle de Courtivron (New York: Schocken Books, 1981), p. 25.

35 Susan Bordo, "Reading the Slender Body," in Body/Politics: Women and the Discourses of Science, ed. Mary Jacobus, Evelyn Fox Keller, and Sally Shuttleworth (New York: Routledge, 1990), p. 85.

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